The Ultimate Revelation Of Honey | UPSC

• It reported that products by many popular brands were not honey, and, in fact, had been spiked with added sugar.
• Therefore, they ought not to be branded and sold as honey.
• The CSE also showed that adulteration technology had become sophisticated.
• There were commercial products available which are designed to cheat the tests that Indian food testing laboratories conduct to ascertain the purity of honey.

SOURCES : DOWNTOEARTH

IS THERE ANYTHING CALLED ‘PURE HONEY’?

• Over millennia, ‘honey’ was what bees made from plant nectar.
• People only just squeezed out the contents of honey combs, scrubbed it clean of bees, pollen and other visible residues.
• This is honey that is either sourced from wild bees or domesticated bees in apiaries.
• However, none of this constitutes ‘pure honey’, because it is a marketing term and a superficial phrase that masks the complexity that is ‘honey’.

• Nowhere does one find the term ‘pure honey’ in it.
• However, given that the adulteration of honey with added sugar is a global problem, the regulations listed the chemical contents.

SOURCES : DOWNTOEARTH

• Tolerable limits of ‘impurities’ that must be detected by specific tests for a batch of honey presented by a company for labelling to earn the right to market its product as honey.

• Or else ‘Honeydew’, which comes mainly from excretions of plant-sucking insects (Hemiptera) on the living parts of plants.
• The honey that is ultimately made available can be a combination of these and can differ widely in ‘honey profiles’.
• There are at least 300 recognised types of honey.

HOW IS HONEY TESTED?

• Honey is primarily a complex of the fructose, glucose and sucrose sugars.

• The latter also breaks down less easily. Laboratory tests determine acceptable ratios of these sugars and tolerance limits.

• HMF is actually toxic for bees.
• The reason a wide range of chemical variety is allowed is because different flowers have varying characteristics of nectar .
• This expresses different chemical compounds that are sensitive to light, temperature and geography.
• Therefore, it is possible to have raw honey that may be less sweet or high on sucrose, or is lighter or darker.

• The most common are the so-called C4 and C3 tests, that determine if sugar from corn, sugarcane or rice was used to adulterate honey.

SOURCES : DOWNTOEARTH

• Then, there are minimal levels of pollen count and foreign oligosaccharides that a quantity of honey must have.
• All of these have a broad tolerance range and are also influenced by the laboratory tests employed to detect them.

• But whether this makes the honey ‘raw’ is an open question. In all, there are 18 parameters for a product to be certified as honey.